"Develop software with your brain, not your fingers."

Application Development

We approach application development from a psychological perspective. The person who knows what the software needs to do is the person who does the job, who most typically is not the person writing the software. We always work with the domain expert in writing the software. In many cases, the domain expert actually writes the software, using the great set of tools we have chosen and also those we have written, with the level of guidance and support from us appropriate to the domain expert's level of expertise. At other times the domain expert is our consultant, on whom we depend to guide us as we work.

That means we start where the client is at the present moment. Whether it is an application built in another development framework and being converted to a modern application, or an application being written from scratch, we know that the process of taking domain expert knowledge and putting it into software is an iterative process, one that needs quick turnaround from idea to reality to evaluation to modified idea (based on the reality expressed in the software). Our tools and development methods recognize the need for iteration as a way of articulating knowledge that is crucial to a successful software project, that exists in the knowledge base of the domain expert, and that also is likely only partially put into words and conscious ideas. The process of quick iteration brings that knowledge base into the open, where we can capture it in software.

Our Tools and our Custom Training are a key part of our application development methodology. Both were created from the perspective of an iterative process of domain expert software development. We teach you to program through the use of metadata, that is, information about how your application should behave, both at the data level and the UI level. "Develop with your brain, not your fingers" has been our mantra for the past 14 years. Lianja incorporates this model of software development to a much greater degree than our previous development tool: we had to do a lot more work to make things happen through metadata. Incorporating Lianja into our style of software development has been a joy. In our training, we share that joy with you.